Dec 03 2006
Litvinenko Crazy Enough To Build Chechen Bomb
Associates of Litvinenko point to a man desparate for money, and crazy enough to build a Chechen dirty bomb:
In early May, Litvinenko first approached Julia Svetlichnaja, a 33-year-old Russian-born academic who is examining the roots of the Chechen conflict for a book she is writing. Litvinenko asked if she was interested in becoming involved in his ‘blackmail’ project.
‘He told me he was going to blackmail or sell sensitive information about all kinds of powerful people including oligarchs, corrupt officials and sources in the Kremlin,’ she said. ‘He mentioned a figure of £10,000 they would pay each time to stop him broadcasting these FSB documents. Litvinenko was short of money and was adamant that he could obtain any files he wanted.’
…
It appears Litvinenko, a vociferous critic of President Vladimir Putin, may have finally acquired the firepower to hurt some of the Kremlin’s most powerful interests. Svetlichnaja said: ‘He did not seem worried. Quite the opposite; Litvinenko sensed he could finally make some money of his own after years of being supported by his friend [and fellow Russian exile] Boris Berezovsky.’
…
Among the theories that remain open is that the poisonings were an accident that happened while Litvinenko tried to assemble a dirty bomb for Chechen rebels. Those who know him believe he was crazy enough to attempt such a thing and, in the past week, some have implicated him in the smuggling of nuclear materials from Russia.
This week should bring the results of the postmortem on Litvinenko. For the first time, detectives will know how much polonium he ingested. Vast quantities would point to a murder; smaller quantities possibly to accidental contamination. From Washington to London to Moscow, detectives, governments and spies are watching and waiting.
So it seems we have a man desparate for cash and fearless about how he could obtain it. As I wrote earlier today here and here, I am of the opinion an assassination attempt would not spend the extra amounts of money to procure 100’s of lethal doses for just one man. A single dose of Polonium-210 should cost around $1 million dollars (a heavy price to pay to replace one bullet). Since Litvinenko had 100 times the lethal dose I doubt seriously we are talkiing about a $100 Million hit job. No way. So I am of the opinion the more Polonium-210 found the less likely it is an assasination attempt.
Update: It seems “Sasha” (as Litvinenko is known) was involved with nuclear material smuggling last year – tied to Scaramella:
FOUR ITALIANS PROBED ON SUSPECTED URANIUM TRAFFIC
Source: Corriere della Sera website, Milan, in Italian 11 Jun 05
ACC-NO: A20050612118-BB2A-GNW
LENGTH: 647 words
HEADLINE: FOUR ITALIANS PROBED ON SUSPECTED URANIUM TRAFFIC
Text of report by Virginia Piccolillo, “Uranium to make atom bomb sold to
four Italians”, published by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera website
on 11 JuneRome: “During the month of September 2004 I was approached by an Ukrainian
national, whom I know by the name of Sasha, who wanted to sell me a
briefcase containing radioactive material, and, more precisely, uranium for
military use.” There is enough testimony by Giovanni Guidi, a Rimini
businessman, and by other defendants – Giorgio Gregoretti, Elmo Olivieri and
Giuseppe Genghini – to fuel a spy story [preceding two words published in
English] worthy of a novel by Le Carre. Involved is a briefcase containing
five kilos of highly enriched uranium, half of which would be enough to
build an atomic device, which remained for months in a Rimini garage. A
briefcase, however, which eluded investigators, and which managed to get
back into the hands of the Ukrainian national, who perhaps is still in
Italy. Together with another briefcase having a similar content, and a third
believed to conceal a tracking system. The entire kit geared to the assembly
of a small tactical atomic bomb.A mystery story fuelled by information supplied the Rimini police department
by a consultant of the Mitrokhin committee, Mario Scaramella, who, acting on
behalf of the agency presided over by Paolo Guzzanti, was trying to track
illegal funds from the former USSR that had transited through [the Republic
of ] San Marino. The two defendants’ defence attorney warns that this “could
be the trial of the century, but also the century’s biggest hoax”. The
mystery, however, continues, and emerges from the testimony of the
defendants, who were questioned Wednesday [8 June] night and all day
Thursday, and subsequently released with the charge of possession of war
weapons.The uranium was allegedly contained in a hermetically sealed, black, leather
briefcase, along with a photo illustrating its content. Five uranium bars
weighing one kilo each. Sasha delivered the briefcase to Guidi. “My
precarious economic situation induced me to accept,” explains the
46-year-old Rimini businessman, who is married to a Russian woman, and runs
an import-export firm that has dealings with Russia and Ukraine. Guidi in
turn informed Giorgio Gregoretti, who “placed it [the briefcase] in a
cardboard box, which he subsequently stored in his garage.” There it
remained until it was placed in the trunk of Gregoretti’s car, where it was
seen by Elmo Olivieri, a financial consultant. Time passes “without their
finding anyone interested in the material”, says Guidi, and the Ukrainian
“asks for the briefcase back”.Guidi also testified that “even another briefcase was to arrive” from the
warehouse of a multinational firm in Basel. At which time he makes another
bid, this time asking for 60/70,000 euros, in addition to bank guarantees
sealed by a three-million-euro credit letter. “We often went to San Marino,”
but nothing came of it, says Guidi. At this point, the three decide to ask
for Genghini’s help, “who in the past had proven to be a war-material
expert”, says Guidi, who reports having learned from Genghini himself that
the uranium was worth 30m euro per kg. Genghini admits having spoken of
radioactive material, but “geared to hospital use”. Later, according to
Guidi, Olivieri mentions a prospective purchaser: a Swiss multinational.
Then, the affair gets muddled. Guidi boasts of being protected by the
intelligence services, and claims he was threatened on 2 June. The only sure
thing is that the Rimini police, headed by Sebastiano Riccio, start looking
for the “atomic” briefcases on 9 June, as soon as they learn that the
defendants are planning to transfer to Lugano. The case is by no means
closed, with search operations still under way.Source: Corriere della Sera website, Milan, in Italian 11 Jun 05
LOAD-DATE: June 12, 2005
Hat tip Reader SBD. I have no idea if this is the same man – but it could be.
I suspect he injested between 100 and 200 micrograms as an assured fatal dose is reported as between 1 and 2 micrograms. A grain of salt would weigh about 50 micrograms. 50 micrograms of polonium would be much smaller than a grain of salt because polonium is heavier than lead and much heavier than sodium, the metal that makes up table salt. So a 100 microgram dose would still be smaller than a grain of salt (because polonium is more than twice as heavy as sodium).
Now imagine Litvinenko gets up from his seat to use the toilet. If you are an assassin, how would you manage to get an object smaller than a grain of salt onto his food without attracting the attention of his companion who is still sitting at the table? Try it yourself. Take an individual grain of salt and try to place it accurately onto anything while you are walking past. Almost impossible.
More likely:
Polonium salt, say polonium chloride, dropped into his water maybe but still that leaves too many questions. If an assassin has a couple of grains of salt, how does the contamination get spread all over London? That isn’t enough physical material to spread to 5 hotel rooms, several planes, possibly 20 locations in total.
Most likely:
The poison was in a solution that somehow spilled or leaked or was sprayed. It would be easy enough to squirt some of this stuff. You wouldn’t be able to control exactly how much got onto a specific item, maybe you would get lucky and get a lot of it in, maybe not so lucky and get only a little.
Still, polonium salt unlike polonium metal can be absorbed through the skin. Getting that stuff on your skin would be a lot more of a problem than getting the pure metal or dust on your skin. Might explain why Litvinenko’s wife has the stuff in her urine.
Wear gloves. Maybe the large amount is a tip off that the delivery method was so diffuse and uncontrolable that an excess ad to be used to be ertain.
The latest is that Scaramella has received a lethal dose but it still has not been showing any physical effects (except for the obvious contamination). If true, that suggests we still don’t know above about what is necessar to kill using whatever delivery method was used here.
***SORRY***Wear gloves. Maybe the large amount is a tip off that the delivery method was so diffuse and uncontrolable that an excess Had to be used to be Certain.
The latest is that Scaramella has received a lethal dose but it still has not been showing any physical effects (except for the obvious contamination). If true, that suggests we still don’t know ENOUGH about what is necessarY to kill using whatever delivery method was used here.
This is a pretty interesting angle:
“It would be stupid to argue that President Putin would sanction the transfer of Polonium-210 to smugglers for killing Litvinenko, because nuke smugglers would have paid these alleged killers more for Polonium-210 than Russia would pay these killers”
An analogy. I hand you a bar of platinum worth a million dollars and offer you a thousand bucks to throw it at someone’s head. What do you do when you leave my office with the bar of platinum?
There are several more plausible explainations for things:
1. Litvinenko was about to go on a little offensive of his own using blackmail and murder to “get back” at those he saw as bad. Sort of like his own little “Dignity and Honor” squad but somehow managed to poison himself.
2. Litvinenko was involved in smuggling of nuclear materials which he had some previous experiance with and had friends with the power and connections to hook up buyers with suppliers. He was somehow poisoned in the process of a transaction.
3. Litvinenko was involved in a smuggling operation and his “partners” wanted to cut him out of the loop and poisoned him.
I just can’t buy that an operation this messy was done by anyone with any training or experiance.
What do you suppose will be the consequences to Putin if it could be proven he was behind this?
Nothing.
He has told the US and the UK he will support them in the Iranian sanctions thing at the UN. (He’ll renege under the counter of course) but would we cross him at such a critical juncture?
Now, it is possible the Iranians did this (directly or thru some thugs from Russia) to put everyone in this spot, but that seems less likely than Putin killing off his enemies to consolidate control knowing he has a get out of jail free card in his pocket.
First, the law that recently authorized Russia to assasinate people outside the country was in direct response to some Russians getting killed in Iraq. It was to allow Russian special operations forces to target terrorists abroad.
Litvinenko was a critic of Putin but not a threat. No more of a threat than Larry Johnson is to Bush. I don’t for a second believe the Russians blew up that apartment building and DO believe the Chechens were not only capable but most likely culpable. In other words, I really don’t believe anyone that matters believes the stuff he was saying. The Chechens have shown through their actions at a movie theatre and at a school and at other places at other times that they are simply murderers bent on killing as many people in as spectacular fashion as they can.
If Putin were found to be directly responsible for not only murdering a British citizen but also endangering the British public through exposure, I would imagine a formal murder charge and extradition request would be made and there would be other damage as well. I really don’t think Putin would get away with it just because he is Putin. The British public would demand something more be done.
The Times article on the apt bombings should raise suspicions in any reasonable mind that the Chechens were behind it..And our press was reporting that much the same way at the time. Only after we needed some cooperation from Russia and some Chechen extremists engaged in very awful terrorism did this initial event drop from general consciousness.
The apartment building could also be just an explosion from a leak. It happens sometimes. I don’t think the Russians would need to stage such a thing because left to their own devices the Chechens themselves do enough to justify actions against them.
I suppose people could say the same thing about the stuff Larry Johnson says, what Plame says and what the Times prints about a lot of things or what Dana Priest writes for the Post. Just because it is printed in a paper doesn’t make it so, as the AP has shown recently. It might be plausible but it doesn’t make it true. And just because someone prints something that you don’t like doesn’t mean you have them killed. If anything killing him would lend credence to what he wrote and would tend to make it more believable. In other words, it would be the worst possible response.
I don’t for a minute believe Putin would have him killed because doing so would act to bolster what he said. His death is probably more useful for the Chechens than for Putin.
I take it you haven’t read the article.
No I haven’t but what difference would it make? You seem convinced Putin did it and nothing anyone says seems to place any doubt about that in your mind though I can see absolutely nothing that points in that direction and things that point in all kinds of other directions.
You seem “spring loaded” to jump right to blaming Putin for it. Sure, I think Putin is the head crook of a government of crooks, but I don’t see any evidence that Putin had anything to do with this particular event and see plenty of indications that it was either accidental or done by someone who was an amateur, such as one of his “business” associates.
A professional would have simply shot him in an elevator like the journalist was dispatched. Maybe snatched him, taken him out in a boat and dumped him at sea. This particular method was just simply WAY too messy.
Here is what I am prepared to say this murder was NOT. It was not someone slipping a poison into his food or spraying him with some substance while he was meeting with the Italian in the sushi bar unless it was the Italian himself who did it. This is because there is boatloads of polonium all over the place in places where his associates had been meeting. Some of it predating the murder by a week or possibly two. This means that his “business” associates had been in contact with polonium for quite some time and had been tracking it all over the place. So it was NOT some carefully targeted hit at the sushi bar.
IF the contamination was done deliberately to throw people ‘off the trail’ of the real killer, then it says the user of the poison knew it would be detected, knew it would be identified, and knew how dangerous it was. If it was just sloppyness, it means the killer DIDN’T think it would ever be located and was indeed one of his “business” associates. You can’t have it both ways. It has to be one or the other. Either the associates were purposely tainted because the “real killer” knew it would be located or they were accidently tainted because the “real killer” was careless or they were tainted in the course of accidental exposure from trafficking in the stuff. The third possibility seems most likely to me judging from the number of places, people, and things contaminated.
Hmm? No previous track record.
In other words you don’t have scientists passing vials; after their chemistry teachers, for years, shouted at students “TO BE CAREFUL,” going on here.
Instead you have jerks. WHO HAVE NO IDEA HOW LETHAL the contamination IS. Even if they heard of Putin’s body guard; nobody, in 1974, knew enough to make medical announcements.
And, this time? Through the back door. Litvinenko got really, really sick!
So, there are PR artists, around? A lot of good this does ya when the sh*t hits the fan!
And, nothing here was “thought out.” In other words, AFTER Litvinenko (Sasha, for short), got good and sick; and got hospitalized did anyone think they might need to “cook up a story” in a hurry. A spook’s good at that! But why trust Litvinenko’s story? Death bed drama? Didn’t we get Bill Casey “talking” to Bob Woodward? Just because you can read it in the papers, doesn’t even make the appearance of truth, occur. (Casey was comatose before dying.)
I always thought Bob Woodward sat on what he knew. But he didn’t hear it when Casey was dying.
Here? Off the cuff? Made up on the spot? And, absolutely MUST cover tracks? Litvenenko did not know his wife was expressing this stuff in her urine. And, the Italian guy? As surprised as the Italian #1 spook, who accompanied Sgrena in her get away car. Out of Iraq. Who knew his brains were gonna get blown out at stop, the car decided to “take on. And, go?”
Isn’t always accidents? So many discoveries. Come about “by accident.” Not quite what was supposed to happen, but does.
IF putin is allowing sales of nuclear merchandise to “da bad guys.” He is loaded for Bear. Da Bear Is. And, that is very worrisome.
While “spin” by definition, is done by professionals, to throw investigators off of their track.
Is there, now, somewhere a dirty nuke suitcase?
Will the ordinary spooks, who didn’t know what they were handling could turn into their own murder weapons, what happens now?
What happens NOW. When people are exposed. But don’t get sick right away? Given that there are PRIME EXAMPLES among Russian Ex-Pats. Who are looking at “borrowed time.”
KEEP DIGGING.
I have told my son on many occasions, that very hard problems are hard to solve. Tackling them takes courage. But what you get, if you stick at it, is not a solution. But you’re looking for an “epiphany.” Something that breaks the log jam. And, opens up a solution to the tough problems. I then add the story of Edison. And, all his attempts to finally find tungsten. Before that? The light just wouldn’t go on.
I love Clarice’s stuff. And, I’m a happy camper when I come here, and my imagination gets tickled. But that this case is “solved?” No way. It’s still a WHO done it. When that becomes clear, we will know WHY.
And, perhaps? We will learn a little something about STUPID. How greedy people, without cares for others, make giant sized mistakes, on their way to do mischief.
I agree with you, Crosspatch. There are too many sites, too many people contaminated and evidently too much polonium involved. With this much polonium makes you wonder who the supplier was. It had to be someone with a vast inventory in this stuff. Russia might have these supplies on hand, but I think Iran is a more likely supplier.
And they would be willing to give something like this to terrorists. But I do wonder how Scaramella was contaminated. Do you suppose he met with someone else besides Litvinenko, someone who was involved with the trade and was exposed at that time? That does not mean he was in on the trade just that he met another contaminated invidual maybe even days or weeks after Nov. l. It seems he really has not shown any symptons until lately.
I haven’t yet read the apartment bombing story in the Times, either, but see it’s titled “Curse of the Moscow Bombs” and that brings to mind that Yukos “mishaps” are often categorized as “the Yukos Curse”; there is a terrible lot of curses taking hold of Russia in the last near-decade, isn’t there?
Here are the deaths of those critical of the official story on the apt bombings:
”
In 2003 Sergei Yushenkov, a liberal member of parliament, was gunned down in Moscow, a case that remains unsolved. Yushenkov had set up an independent commission to investigate the bombings.
Later that year Yuri Shchekochikhin, another MP who was on the commission, died in mysterious circumstances and is believed to have been poisoned.
Shchekochikhin was also an editor at Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper where Anna Politkovskaya, the fierce Kremlin critic, worked until she too was gunned down in October this year.
Shchekochikhin was taken ill suddenly and developed awful symptoms: his skin peeled, he was covered in boils, his hair fell out and he suffered respiratory failure.
(snip)
In August 2004 Mikhail Trepashkin, who like Litvinenko was a former FSB officer who became close to Berezovsky, was arrested while investigating the bombings on behalf of the commission. He was thrown in jail on trumped-up charges of passing on state secrets to Britain.
Trepashkin had claimed that Vladimir Romanovich, a man who rented out the basement in one of the bombed buildings, was in fact an FSB agent. Romanovich was hit and killed by a car in Cyprus a few months after the bombings.
Meanwhile, Otto Latsis, another commission member and editor of the liberal Russky Kuryer newspaper, was beaten unconscious shortly after Trepashkin’s arrest.
Then there is the case of Politkovskaya, who wrote extensively about Chechnya, the bombings and crimes committed by the security forces. Two years before her murder, she was poisoned on her way to cover the Beslan school siege. “
I believe a liquid containing a polonium salt would be readily absorbed through the skin. Another problem with transporting polonium is the container that must be used. Because of the ionizing radiation, only special materiel designed for that environment can be used. Otherwise the material of the container is attacked and breaks down. So if the stuff is transported in an unsuitable container, it is possible for it to fail. Polonium is an intense alpha emitter that would cause physical damage to some materials such as plastic. It also ionizes glass and silica containers causing them to become very fragile. If someone is carrying around polonium, they had better have it in a VERY special container designed for use under severely ionizing radiation.
Polonium is such a nasty element to deal with, I really don’t see anyone using it on purpose as a poison unless they are a total nut. I certainly wouldn’t want to carry any of it around with me.
Yeah, well, people keep dying who dig too deeply into the Clintons too.
How Polonium Kills